


I Will Become What I Deserve

by a_lrightevans



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-10-19
Updated: 2016-10-19
Packaged: 2018-08-23 11:57:27
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,345
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8326978
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/a_lrightevans/pseuds/a_lrightevans
Summary: You know that Lily pities you. That your father worries about you and your mother wishes Vernon was someone else, but you don’t care.This is your happiness and nobody else’s.





	

**i.**

It’s the kind of day that’s built for nostalgia. You don’t know that yet, of course, because you’re eight and you don’t even know what the word nostalgia means.

Part of you can feel it anyway.

Lily races you down to the sea and wins, but that’s okay; you’re too busy cackling with laughter and kicking up sand to care. You deliver a handful of the gritty, wet stuff right into her face and she gives a delighted scream and pushes you down into the sea. In reality, there have been hundreds upon hundreds of moments of laughter shared between Lily and you, nestled comfortably between the fights and temper tantrums, but one day, looking back, it’ll seem as though they can all be pinpointed to this exact day. Eventually, you’ll forget about how you got into a fight on the way back to the car because she made you drop your ice-cream, and you’ll forget how the day was slightly too cool for sea swimming, how your skin felt sore and chapped for days. You’ll just remember the pale sunlight and the sound of laughter ringing like bells, and it’ll make you sadder than the memory of any fight the two of you ever had.

**ii.**

Lily jumps from swings and shrieks with delight as she flies ten feet into the air, propelled by laughter and light and sheer force of will. She makes flowers bloom in the palms of her hands emerges from rivers completely dry. One time, after a fight, she turns your hair green, and another time makes the thousands of broken shards of a vase you’ve just broken reassemble right before your eyes, moments before your mother walks in.

There are a thousand improbable things about Lily, but the most improbable is this: everybody seems to _like_ her. Kids at school sit beside her at lunch without prompting and invite her to their houses after school. Teachers laugh at her jokes and nobody smirks if she falls over or says something stupid. It doesn’t make sense. You do all the right things; you wear the right shoes and you hand in your homework on time, you compliment people on their haircuts (even if they’re hideous), and you say your ‘Please’s and ‘Thank You’s, but nothing seems to work. Sometimes you wonder if it’s what you look like- Lily inherited your mother’s dark red hair and brightly freckled skin, which you tell yourself looks lurid and garish, but in reality makes you feel dull as dishwater beside her. But you don’t _think_ that’s it. You aren’t _ugly_. You’re convinced there must just be some sort of secret code to making people like you that you haven’t quite cracked yet.

It’s not that you don’t have _any_ friends; you sit with a few of the older girls at lunch, girls with straight backs and neat uniforms, who murmur about the other kids’ scuffed shoes and cheap clothes. Mostly you manage to convince yourself that these are the only sort of people worth your time, that everybody else is childish and silly and strange, but one time you watch Lily howling at something so uncontrollably that she accidentally snorts apple juice out of her nose, and realise that you can’t remember the last time you laughed that hard at something.

**iii.**

‘And in transfiguration we turned teapots into real Tortoises! Well, mine looked more like a sea urchin, but still. One boy’s tortoise kept spitting fireballs- he _claims_ it was an accident, but I doubt it. Potter may be an idiot but he isn’t stupid, he’s good at Transfiguration. I always trounce him at Potions though-‘

You stab your fork into a piece of broccoli so hard that the clattering sound pulls your parents out of the Lily-induced trance they both slip into every time she so much as opens her mouth. There’s a look of guilt on your mother’s face, a look you’ve grown used to.

‘Petunia, why don’t you tell Lily about the biology project you’ve been working on?’

Lily looks at you with what seems like genuine interest, but you know better to think she could possibly care about something as mundane as biology when she’s been off turning teapots into tortoises all year.

‘I hate biology.’

‘Oh, go on, Tuney. Hogwarts doesn’t teach us anything like that, it’s bad, really.‘

‘Well maybe you should drop out and go to a real school, if it bothers you _that_ much.’

The words are out before you even think about them and you instantly know they sounded bitter and petty and a million miles away from the carelessly cutting remark you were going for.

‘Just because you’re jealous doesn’t mean you have to take it out on _me_ .’ She snaps back, her voice gone cold. ‘It’s been three years Tuney, it’s getting _pathetic_ -‘

‘Girls-‘ warns your father, but he goes ignored.

‘Oh _please_ \- you and your friends are a  _freak show_ , Lil-‘

‘At least I _have_ friends-‘

It feels like a punch to the gut, and you can tell that Lily is as floored by her comment as you are.

‘Tuney-‘ she begins ‘I’m-‘

‘May I leave the table?’  

There’s an awkward pause.

‘ _May I leave the table_?’

Eventually, your mother relents with a tight-lipped nod, and you storm up the stairs and lock your bedroom door.

**iv.**

It’s the middle of the night and Lily is sitting at the end of your bed. It’s disconcerting. She hasn’t been in here in five years, since she was eleven, and she looks as uncomfortable as you feel.

‘I need to tell you something, Tuney,’ she whispers into the dark, then pauses, as if unsure how to go on ‘About- about _my_ world. You can’t tell mum or dad. They’ll worry.’

You don’t reply, but you don’t tell her to shove off either. There’s something strange about her voice, she sounds different. Older.

She sounds afraid.

‘Tell me,’ you hear yourself saying, and she does.

**v.**

You see the way your mother looks at Vernon. She’s always welcoming and polite, of course, but you see the slight disbelief, the slight disappointment, that _this_ is the man her daughter has fallen in love with.

It doesn’t surprise you, not really; your mother is too much like Lily. Foolish and romantic and idealistic. Vernon isn’t tall or handsome or witty or even all that charming, really.

He’s absolutely _perfect_.

He’s always on time when he picks you up for dates. He’s a junior executive, despite only being a few years older than you, and has already bought his own car (expensive, but not _flashy_.) He doesn’t mind that you aren’t all that funny- he prefers telling jokes to listening to them anyway, and he always pays for dinner, and knows how to properly taste the wine.

He’s the first person you’ve ever met to be utterly unimpressed by Lily.

‘Bit of a character isn’t she, your sister?’ he says one evening, after the first time they’d met. ‘Don’t take this the wrong way, Petunia dear, but she’s headed for trouble that one. Not at all like you.’

You could _kiss_ him, and you do.

(Because Vernon doesn’t like Lily. He doesn’t like flaming red hair or magic tricks. He doesn’t like silly jokes or far-fetched stories or grand adventures.)

(Vernon likes _you_.)

**vi.**

Lily is crying in the middle of the restaurant. You’ve always hated how she would just give into her random bursts of emotions no matter the circumstances; she could at least wait until she gets _home_.

Vernon’s face has gone from red to purple to white in the last thirty seconds and James Potter only wipes the self-satisfied smirk off his face when he notices Lily’s tears.

He’s exactly the sort you always knew Lily would fall for; arrogant, self-involved, always making a spectacle of himself. Vernon had only tried to make polite conversation, asking what car James owned, and he’d started prattling on about streamlined bristles and oak handles- in _public_ , where _anybody_ could’ve been listening in! Everything from his too-loud laugh to the unsightly mop of black hair on his head makes you thankful for the solid, _sensible_ man sat besides you.

‘Shit-‘ he says, much too loudly, and tries to apologise to Lily, but she stands up abruptly, chair scraping in a way that makes you cringe, and storms out. James excuses himself and follows her.

Vernon looks like he may have gone into mild shock, so you place your hand over his.

‘I knew we shouldn’t have come.’

**vii.**

‘You look beautiful, Tuney,’ Lily says, and you smile graciously.

Maybe it’s that Lily sounds genuine, or maybe it’s just that your wedding day has put you into such a glowing mood that not even your sister can affect you, but for once, the sound of her voice doesn’t feel like a bucket of ice water. She’d sniped at you after you told her she couldn’t be a bridesmaid because the dress wasn’t her colour, and you’d almost been hoping she wouldn’t turn up, but now that she’s here you’re sort of relieved.

‘Thank you, Lily.’

You’re in such a good mood that you don’t even tell her that the blender she’d bought was useless seeing as Yvonne had already got you one, and from a _much_ better brand.

It’s been months upon months of hectic planning, angry phone calls and sleepless nights, but when you finally walk down the aisle, everything else fades away.

The man standing in front of you loves you in spite of every shocking, shameful secret he knows about your family. He asked for your father’s permission and then proposed in your sitting room with a diamond ring that cost three months’ salary. You have a semi-detached house with three bedrooms, a front porch and a garden waiting for you a million miles from Cokeworth, a million miles from Lily and a million miles from anywhere with even the slightest whisper of magic.

You know that Lily pities you. That your father worries about you and your mother wishes Vernon was someone else, but you don’t care.

This is your happiness, and nobody else’s.

He slips the gold ring onto your finger.

**viii.**

You don’t feel guilty.

If your disaster of a sister wants to get herself knocked up then hold a shotgun wedding, and in the middle of a war (if she’s to be believed), then that’s _her_ decision, but you shouldn’t have to put your entire life on hold.

You have plans that day. You can’t just cancel your weekly brunch with Yvonne, it’d be _rude_.

You _almost_ feel guilty when you remember that the last time you saw her was your mother’s funeral. That you barely spoke a word to her the entire time, even when she so clearly wanted to talk to you. You almost feel guilty. Except.

Except it’ll be all _her lot_ there, weirdos and freaks. You wouldn’t subject yourself to it, and you certainly wouldn’t subject Vernon to it, and, although you’d never admit it out loud, you’re keen to keep the tiny little life growing inside of you as far away from all that hocus pocus nonsense as possible.

Just in case.

So no, you don’t feel guilty.

(You do send her a wedding gift, though. A vase, one of the things you dug out from your mother’s wardrobe when you were looking through her stuff. And if it’s the same vase she fixed for you, all those years ago, then you don’t notice. It’s just a vase.)

**ix.**

You read the letter from Lily three times in a row before the words have any real meaning.

Of all the stupid things in the world.

It’s not like you care, you tell yourself repeatedly, it’s not like it’s any of _your_ business what Lily does with her life, but just _how_ she’s managed to go and get herself this tangled up in a war, you have no idea. She never could just keep her head down, gallivanting about with that husband of hers, you suppose it was only a matter of time until they upset the wrong person.

But _really_ , a newborn baby, and a mass murderer _personally_ out to get them, absolutely no sense of responsibility. _Anything_ could happen to them, and then what would become of the baby?

The glass you’re holding shatters in your hand, blood splattering the letter and shards tinkling to the ground.

You take a few steadying breaths, fold up the letter neatly, place it in the bottom of a mostly unused kitchen draw, then set about cleaning up the mess.

**x.**

Despite everything, you’ve found your happiness. It’s small and unassuming, in a quiet corner of the world. It’s in neatly trimmed shrubbery and home cooked meals. In Sunday brunches with your friends and gossip over the garden fence. It’s in Dudley, your baby, your precious angel, the only thing you’ve ever loved truly and purely and unselfishly.

It’s not a lot to ask for.

And yet.

One morning, you step outside, and the world stops.

One morning, you step outside, and there’s a tiny creature on your doorstep with _exactly_ her eyes.

He’s screaming up at you because it’s cold out, because he’s probably hungry, because—you know it to be true in the depths of your stomach—his mother is dead.

(It wasn’t a lot to ask for.)

( _She couldn’t just let you have it._ )

There’s a note tucked up beside him, enclosed in his tiny fist, and as you read it you feel the tears falling down your cheeks, instantly cooling in the frigid November air, and you know.

You know that this boy with her eyes will never make Dudley feel second best. That you’ll never let the magic in his veins wreck havoc on him like it did to you. That you will refuse to allow Lily’s mistakes to ruin the happiness you’ve built with your own two hands.

You know that these are the last tears you will ever cry for your sister.

 

 


End file.
